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Saturday, November 14, 2009

The Jobless Rate for People Like You

Check out this graphic: The Jobless Rate for People Like You - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com. It shows the various jobless rates for varying groups of people. Some of the results are a bit surprising: women, for example, are faring better than men right now. Others are disturbing: black college graduates, while doing better than the population as a whole, do only about the same as white people of all education levels combined. The recession is clearly toughest on the young. It's just interesting to see this all visually.

3 comments:

Thanks for the intertesting post. I'm in the 3.9% group, so I guess I should be thankful. A good friend of mine, just a few years older, no college, but a HS grad and very skilled machinist is in the 7.9% group, and hasn't had a steady job in over two years. It's tough out there.

I found your blog through evangelicalarminians.org and I love what I've read so far.

I'm struggling like you would not believe with all aspects of Calvinism, and what people declare to be a wonderful sense of security has left me doubting my salvation, because there's no way God would choose my sinful self.

I'm very grateful that you're enjoying what you're reading here. Please feel free to comment or ask questions on any entry here--it doesn't have to be recent.

You'll find a lot of what I've written regarding Calvinism compiled together as a few larger posts in the "Studies" section (see the tabs near the top of the page). I hope you find them helpful.

I do think that Calvinism lends itself to a lack of security, because rather than making one wonder if they could eventually fall away, it makes them wonder if they were ever really saved to begin with. But I would also say that even under the Calvinistic system, there is no contradiction in God choosing your "sinful self." Something we should all agree on is that absolutely none of us come anywhere near deserving the grace of God. Our relative "goodness" and "badness" is pretty insignificant when compared with the holiness of God. God chose to glorify Himself by mercifully choosing to save any of us. That's true whether He selected individuals to save (Calvinism) or whether He selected faith in Jesus as the means to salvation and then offered that means to all of sinful humanity (Arminianism).

None of us deserve to be saved. Which is really freeing, if you think about it, because we can give up the hopeless quest of trying to deserve it. And we can offer it freely to anyone else, regardless of their past, because if our past doesn't matter (good or bad) then theirs doesn't either.